Imperial College London Scientists Have Developed a System to Quickly Detect Trace Amounts of Chemicals Like Pollutants, Explosives or Illegal Drugs

The new system can pick out a single target molecule from 10 000 trillion water molecules within milliseconds, by trapping it on a self-assembling single layer of gold nanoparticles. The team of scientists, all from the Department of Chemistry at Imperial, say this technology opens the way to develop devices that are compact, reusable and easy to assemble, and could have a range of uses including detecting illegal drugs, explosives, pollutants in rivers or nerve gases released into the air. Results of the research are published this week in Nature Materials.